


everything stays

by Cinnamonbookworm



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/F, NoLaurelNoArrow, hiding behind the plural, i'm a mess can't you tell, late nights and breakdowns, post-Laurel's Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-28
Updated: 2016-04-28
Packaged: 2018-06-04 23:22:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6680059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cinnamonbookworm/pseuds/Cinnamonbookworm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>It's the silence now that she's gone that scares her the most</i><br/>Or: Everything reminds Felicity of Laurel and the impossibility of what could've been now that she's gone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	everything stays

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SkyeStan (Overdressedtokill)](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=SkyeStan+%28Overdressedtokill%29).



> There are few times when I have found myself pouring my entire soul and being into a character. I've always been of the opinion that self-insertions should only be done rarely, and even then to be careful.  
> I can promise, I was as careful as I possibly could've been, because we're both grieving, and we both loved her. More than anything.

It’s the silence now that she’s gone that scares her most.

The way her nights are quiet now, how her phone doesn’t buzz with a link to an article from the New York Times or a clever rare emoji anymore. The way the city is quiet now, no glass-shattering, mind-blowing scream to wake her up when she’s sleeping, making her feel safer. No pillar of support anymore.

Felicity doesn’t allow herself to sleep because the one time she’d tried she was haunted by the sound of drowning, that utter sadness that threatened to consume the both of them from time to time except now she’s alone in it.

_“She’d told me she felt like she was drowning”_ Sara had said at the memorial, small hands clasped together. _“She’d told me she felt like she was drowning and being the Black Canary made it stop for a while.”_

It’s that very feeling that threatens to consume her now when sleep clouds the edges of her vision. It’s that very feeling that makes her chug another pint of coffee and rub her eyes and scroll through her Facebook feed with that sense of lost wandering only people awake at two in the morning with nothing to do have.

She’s doing research on new developments in cancer research, hoping the tech that helped her become able to walk again can be used in other areas of the medical field. Felicity must have gone through a thousand articles at this point, from her competitors _and_ her subsidiaries alike, but she just can’t stop.

At least, she can’t until she sees the one about the doctors in London who have started using high-frequency blasts of sound to kill cancer cells without killing the rest of the cells around them. It’s perfect. So perfect of a fit that it hurts, it aches. The same cold ache she’s had since the hospital grows only stronger as it travels in shivers down the back of her neck to every extent of her body. It’s that type of cold that almost feels hot once it consumes her fully. It’s like that feeling she’d get when she’d run her hands under hot water after going in the snow during the cold winters at MIT. It hurts, it hurts, it _hurts._

It’s the combination of both of them, she thinks, that does it. The absolute knowledge of how easily the two of them fit together; canary cry and the cure for cancer. What an absolute perfect pair. If only she was still-

_It hurts._ Her breathing feels shallow and tears have already started falling, but it’s not that loud, frantic breakdown that happened at the hospital and the funeral and at dinner and all day afterwards. It’s just quiet. And there. And it makes her feel so so tired.

This would be the perfect text, or maybe a tweet. A simple link between the two of them that solves both the problem Felicity’s looking for the solution to and the problem she didn’t even know needed fixing. They’d talk all the way through the night, ignoring the thumping reminder in their heads that they should be sleeping because they’ve pulled all-nighters together just talking before and this would be nothing new. At the end of it all, Felicity would call up Cisco and they’d get to work on what else they could do with this idea. Her representatives would call up the doctors over in Britain. She’d give a presentation to the board the next week. And they both would be happy. And alive. And they’d both feel that way too.

Except now she can’t even stomach the thought of doing any of this without her. She can’t take the canary cry apart to examine it because she can’t even think of defiling the memory of her…

A siren sounds outside. For a second, Felicity lets herself hope; the same way she had when the door had squeaked earlier. Any high-pitched sound gives her the worst semblance of hope. And so, because of this terribly misplaced feeling of _maybe_ , Felicity sends the text anyways.

_Doing research and I thought of you. Any chance you’d let me toy around w the cry in payment for brunch tomorrow? https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/oct/31/ultrasound-cancer-research-hifu-bone-trial_

There is no brunch tomorrow. No plans at all. But she sends it anyway because it feels right. It feels brokenly, terribly right. It feels almost like a strike to balance. She feels - no, she knows in her gut - that Laurel left them all too soon. Somewhere along the line things got so messed up and now she’s gone and…

It was her birthday on the Sunday after she died.

The funeral was on the Wednesday after that.

Sara wasn’t in yet, and Nyssa wasn’t either because Laurel had been the only one very sure how to contact her on the team. Captain Lance had gone to Central City to tell Laurel’s mother. So, against her better instinct, she’d called Thea up.

Thea, who was still living in the apartment she’d shared with Laurel, having to breathe in her smell on everything, having to relive memories every second of every day. Thea, who was probably the only one left in town who loved her as much as Felicity did.

(That’s unfair, she knows that. She knows that Oliver loved her - in his own way - and she knows beyond everything that Dig loved her too she just…)

They opened up a bottle of wine in celebration and just bawled their eyes out.

Their connection, for possibly the first time in a while, was not about Felicity being Thea’s brother’s girlfriend or fiancee or ex-fiancee or assistant or whatever. No, in that one moment it was about Laurel. It was about someone who’d been taken from the two of them far too soon. It was about confessions that came too little too late.

At least, on Felicity’s end, it was.

She’d said it before, sure, nearly a thousand times, but never like that. Never like…

And she couldn't even say it with an _I_ because she was too scared, so she hid behind a _we_ , thinking that there would be other opportunities because the doctors said she was _fine_ and…

And now she’s gone.

Everything else is just an echo.

She wasn’t over here much really, they were always out and about and that could be why Felicity’s trying as hard as she possibly can to keep herself secluded between here and Palmer Tech. The cafes, the libraries, the museums, the parks, they are all covered with that fresh white cold powder of the memory of her. Laurel Lance is snow in April, Laurel Lance is that cold reminder every bad thing she’d thought had finally past could still take the most important things away from her.

Spring is for beginnings, but right now spring tastes like an ending.

Really, she’s almost tempted to change her hair again. Cut it or dye it or do _something_ to disfigure herself to the point where when she looks in the mirror she won’t be reminded of careful brushes of fingers on necks and Laurel fixing her sad attempt at pinning her hair up for the campaign party.

_“I haven’t done this with short hair before,”_ she’d given as an excuse.

Laurel had smiled, burgundy lips like an invitation, stamped and sealed and almost sent but not quite. Like a love letter. Like a confession.

Short hair is silver hairpins and that never-gentle punch-to-the-gut reminder that she’s gone.

So maybe this time she’ll try growing it out. 

Living with grief has never been easy for her before. She’s not good at it. Felicity is good at so many things but when it comes to waking up only for the hurt to hit her before the sun even has a chance she can barely take it.

When she ends up presenting this idea to the board tomorrow she’ll be standing tall at a podium but on the inside she’ll be curled up in the fetal position, trying to keep her insides from leaking out. She’s Snowden, and one day someone will see the sorry state of her guts and come to the same conclusion she has about mortality.

There are two sad sorts of irony in this comparison. The first being that all she wants right now is to explain that metaphor to Laurel, because she knows both Laurel and Oliver read the book in high school and yet neither of them got that comprehensive flurry of understanding the metaphor because they weren’t totally paying attention. The second being the only person she knows who knew how to survive without letting their guts spill out, who knew how to sew themselves up and keep the world from reading that one sad imminent prophecy is gone now.

To unlearn the lesson of mortality, Felicity would have to reverse it.

She’s never quite wished to have superpowers before. Perhaps in passing when she’s trying to reach the top shelf at a supermarket, or when all she wants is to disappear she’s considered the notion in that brief “maybe my life would be easier” way. But right now, she’d trade almost everything for just one day with the ability to have Barry’s time travel capabilities. 

Just one day. She knows she’s whole without them, that there’s nothing keeping her from being a hero without them, but the sad fact of the matter is she doesn’t feel whole without _her_.

It’s later than she’d realized when she’d started all this.

The sun is beginning to come up. Another sleepless night passed but at least this time she’s managed to get some sort of productive thing done.

A bird chirps outside her window.

Felicity feels each note like an arrow in the heart.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the song from Adventure Time's "Stakes" series.


End file.
